Specifying Faces to use for areas

Use Layer Name

If you place a face in the layer _SD_AREA within a component or group, it will use that face (including scaling) to determine the area of the Component or Group

Identify face in existing component

To define and use areas for a component:

Add a new attribute, and use %a% in its calculation.(Or %a-m% for square meters, %a-cm% for square centimeters or %a-f% for square feet.)

After placing your component in a model, right click on it and select Define Area

Select a face in the component to be used as the area.

Note: This feature will only work if a single face in the component can be used to calculate the area.

Haw to use Area and cost per unit to create a reort

Area is especially complicated because we have to have a face to calculate the area of. You can define the face to use for area in one of two ways:

(See: SpaceDesign_Area)

Specifying Faces to use for areas

(see above)

Attribute for Area

Then you have to create an attribute to use for the area. or for area * price per square unit

To create an attribute called, area:

Create a new attribute (e.g. area)

Set it as numeric and set the number of decimal places desired.

Set it's calculation as %a-m% - meaning area in square meter.

Cost per Square Meter

If the cost per square meter is fixed for the entire project, then you can use a constant value. If it is different for different components, then you will need to create an attribute for it, and enter a value for each component.

After creating the attribute, you can right click on each component to set the cost.

Cost of component based on area:

Now create a new attribute - which will be the area times cost-per-m2

Set the calculation to: %cost-per-m2% * %area%

Note the drop down box above the calculation area makes it easy to copy and paste the %attribute% formats:

Click on it to bring up a list of attributes to use in the calculation.

Combining Area and Area-Cost

In this example I used one attribute for area, and a second attribute for area cost.

I could have used just one attribute - area cost - by including the %a-m% in the calculation string:

Use: %cost-per-m2% * %a-m% - instead of - %cost-per-m2% * %area%

Extending the area or area-cost by count:

(Not you cannot use %count% in a calculation. Extensions can only be done using a "Extended" attribute.

Create a new attribute for the extended area-cost (area-cost * quantity)

Final Report

I included all the variables in the report. (This is a good idea during testing) You could suppress some of them from the report later if they are not needed)